


Citrus

by Her_Madjesty



Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gleb Wants, Lust, Masturbation, Pining, Suffering, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 00:22:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12377133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty
Summary: He wants her, has wanted her since the moment he saw her, but she’d run, and he’d chased, and now they’re here. Governments instead of people. Ideals instead of pleasure.





	Citrus

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Crossing the Nevsky Prospekt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11273577) by [vampyrekat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vampyrekat/pseuds/vampyrekat). 



> Screw this show; why do I like it so much?
> 
> Here's another collection of sorts following Gleb and his evolution along with a touch of violent passions, obsession, and love, all wrapped in a properly pretentious, metaphoric bow. Scene in the Neva Club inspired by "Crossing the Nevsky Prospekt." Hope you enjoy. XOXO

I.

Frost crawls up Gleb Vaganov’s office window and leaves the air inside smelling wet, like smog and sweat and cotton. Gleb stares through the crystals and down to the streets below. The faces of his people swirl to meaningless sludge, but if he squints, he can pretend he knows them: there is Veronika smoking her cigarettes; there is Babka Galina warming her hands by a fire; there is Dmitry defacing a poster, and really, Gleb should do something about that boy and his coal-stained hands, but he hasn’t. Not yet. Instead, he lingers, presses ungloved fingers against the glass of the window and doesn’t flinch at the cold. The frost melts at his touch, but only just.

When he pulls back, there are streaks dripping from five perfect dots, but the window is quick to freeze over again.

Gleb returns to his desk and tries to remind himself of what spring tastes like in Leningrad. He imagines it like the lemons he keeps in his top drawer; he pulls one out and presses it to his lips, inhaling deep. His tongue curls, instinctive against the citrus bite.

He lingers too long before setting the lemon aside. It’s with renewed exhaustion that he runs a hand through his hair, rises again, and starts to brew himself tea. There is paperwork to do, reports to read, rumors to squash.

The telephone rings. Gleb abandons his tea and answers the call.

II.

Morning, and he walks along the banks of the Neva, watching her ice chunks cluster and stall the flow. Gleb tugs on the tips of his gloves and frowns. The fabric sticks between his fingers; it itches, but he never complains.

It’s too early for the streets to be bustling. The sun, where it catches on the back of his neck, doesn’t burn. Gleb watches puffs of his own breath rise up into the air and stares at bodies curled next to buildings, huddled under piles of thin blankets. A woman’s lips have cracked in the night, and her blood has frozen to her chin. A child is too still at a young mother’s breast.

Winter, Gleb decides, has lasted far too long.

He begins another round and feels the tightness in his chest dissipate as Leningrad comes back to life. Snow crunches beneath the boots of thousands. Voices break the crispness of the air. A woman offers him a fistful of peppermint sticks in exchange for his gloves; he laughs at her boldness before turning her away.

The street sweeper appears when he’s on his way back to the office, crossing over Neva once more. A few of the ice flows break from their pack; the water flows free again. The sunlight, rising higher, catches in the untucked strands of the street sweeper’s hair.

Gleb freezes midstep and nearly falls flat on his face.

III.

His father doesn’t have a grave.

Night falls, and Gleb closes up the office, tucking the key in his breast pocket and tugging his hat low over his ears. He can feel his lips chapping and longs for his small apartment. Still, he delays, walking on to the Neva and down its twisting banks, not an officer but a man. When he looks up to the stars, he can see his father in them; his eyes sparking with old laughter and pride he can no longer voice. It’s easier to imagine this than the man he became, so Gleb – doesn’t try to do otherwise. In his memory, his father is always smiling. They stand on Leningrad’s bridges together, order tea from their favorite shops, and take care to bring sweets home to Gleb’s mother.

Gleb’s mother has a grave. He hasn’t visited it in some time.

Above him, snow starts to fall. Gleb swears, low and cold, and doesn’t notice the eyes in the shadows, the bleeding knuckles and dulling eyes that watch him as he continues on his way.

IV.

And these are the things that guide him, when again, morning comes, and his boots leave heavy prints behind him in the snow. Dmitry refuses to cower when he chastises. A woman tries to sell him sweets. A truck backfires, and the street sweeper with hair like summer drops to her knees. Gleb doesn’t understand, for a moment, why he drops down with her, but his own blood is pounding, and he’s reaching out, all the while studying the bruises under her eyes from some unbridgeable distance.

He brushes her skin for but an instance, and still it sets his fingers aflame.

“You’re shaking,” he says, the words tripping off his tongue. This, when a few streets away, a mother is dying; this, when of course she’s shaking; he’s shaking, too, but try as he might, Gleb can’t feel the cold. “There’s a tea shop just a few meters away. Please, let me buy you a drink.”

He wants to drive the fear from her eyes; it eats at him as she stands and brushes his offer aside. There’s steel in her spine, he can tell. She tucks her hands and broom behind her back where he can’t see either, and as he stands, he wonders why.

Her eyes, though – even through the suspicion and fear, there is...something heavy.

“Thank you,” she says, sweet as snowdrops on the hillside, “but this job was hard to come by.”

And with that, she scurries away from him, and his father’s voice echoes in his ears: “Chase her, chase her, what are you doing, Glebka; when you meet a woman like that, you chase her!”

Gleb is rooted to the spot; his boots too heavy to move. When she looks back at him, she’s smiling, and it feels like she’s burned him, like she’s buried herself in his chest and set his blood alight.

“Fool,” his father murmurs, an affectionate thing.

By the time Gleb manages to make his voice work, the girl’s already gone.

V.

He eats dinner in the office, borscht heated on the stove down in the communal kitchens. The broth threatens to drip on several of his reports, but Gleb can’t bring himself to care. The day has been long. The cold hasn’t stopped. His office may be heated, but there are icicles standing in for vertebrae on his back, and his head is swimming for want of warmth.

The telephone rings. He takes the call. He cracks a joke that nearly steals away an abrupt promotion, and deep in his chest, his father sighs. Gleb stares out his frosting window and traces Yusupov Palace with his eyes; it is a giant, paint chipping, windows broken, gates crumbling. He’s struck by a sudden, vicious pride, and then there’s an officer and a girl and his borscht’s gone cold.

He turns.

Their would-be Anastasia carries sunlight in her hair; her eyes are the blue of a sky he’s not seen in weeks. Gleb sputters. His tongue threatens to turn to stone in his mouth, but still he manages to send his dutiful officer away.

“What’s your name?” He doesn’t mean to ask it, but it’s like his mind’s gone blank.

“What are my charges?” No games, just a voice that doesn’t shake, even when her shoulders do. Gleb, brain like a snow bank, shrugs out of his jacket and offers it to her at once.

The girl eyes it, wary.

“You’re shivering.” He’s like a record, skipping. “Take it. Just until you warm up.”

He doesn’t understand what happens to him when she does, pressing her trembling fingers against the cloth. There’s a rush, a breathlessness, and the room is spinning, so he sits and does his best to try and pull himself back together.

VI.

The exchange that follows is – heated. Gleb doesn’t mean for it to happen, but before he knows it, he’s back on his feet, pacing while Anya – finally, her name, _Anya_ – brushes off rumors and plays with her own fancies. When he looks at her, he sees the graying edges of her psyche, knows the feral way she pulls away from him, even sheltered in his coat.

(And the coat – the coat’s a distraction; overall a terrible idea. Gleb loses his train of thought while she’s in the midst of defending herself, stuck instead on the way her pale fingers curl against the gray. His shining buttons hold no candle to her glowing eyes, and he finds himself wondering how to get her in his clothes more often – what she’d look like in the coat, alone.)

(It’s a dangerous road. Shame closes his throat, leaves him offering tea alongside his warnings.)

She leaves his office like he hasn’t dismissed her, but rather like a woman who owns every floor. It infuriates him until she hangs his jacket on the door hook; despite the impatience and fear and animal rage in her eyes, her touch against it is gentle. When the door swings shut behind her, Gleb finds that he can do nothing more than collapse.

Her tea cup is still half full. He empties it out his office window, but he can’t bring himself to wash it. Hours later, borscht forgotten, he presses the rim against his lips and wonders at the taste of lemon, if it came from him or the touch of her mouth. The smell of her, sweat and summer and smog, has already wormed its way into his coat; he shrugs it on when he goes to leave and has to steady himself on the door, bitter lust coursing through him.

He walks by the Neva again, that night. Eyes watch him from the shadows. Still, he doesn’t see them.

VII.

He works. She runs. The little street sweeper dances down the cobblestone, and he watches, transfixed, from his office window. Dmitry is with her, because of course he is, and so is the fallen aristocrat. Gleb bites his tongue until he tastes iron, but he can’t move, can’t keep himself from following the insistent glinting of her hair.

He’s not sure how his chair ends up upended, but his hands are shaking, and the wood – well. This is, after all, the man born of the Romanov killer; the general who’s familiar with the taste of a bullet.

When he goes to bed that night, he dreams. There are gunshots (as always), and snow, and a girl. He follows her, two steps behind, and his footsteps swallow hers as they run through the white. She smiles at him. He stops breathing. When he looks down, he’s bleeding; like she’s shot him without a gun. She stops running as he crumples, inches closer, hand outstretched.

Gleb looks up into Romanov eyes and wonders which is worse: sympathy or death.

VIII.

There comes a moment, lurking in Paris’s glitzing shadows, that he does his damnedest to forget. He sees her. A traitor. She, in turn, a vision: pink dress and pink skin and – legs? arms? light?

Gleb may forget how to move, forgets what he’s supposed to do with his hands, what he’s ever done with his hands, if he’s even supposed to have hands. He follows her, thoughtless, into the Neva Club, and stokes his rage at the furs and the titles.

Fire in his chest, he watches her. It’s such confliction: her laughing mouth, the dancing men. He’s on his feet before he can stop himself, and then he has her in his arms, her looking up, no longer afraid of him.

“A good and loyal Russian,” he tells her, “should not find a home in Paris.”

“Tell me more about home, comrade,” she says. His grip on her waist tightens. He wants to ask about her companions, but the song’s changing, and she’s lingering. The heat of her – it is too much.

He never manages to answer her, simply bows and kisses the unbloodied knuckles of her hand. In his retreat, he walks by the Seine and meets his father’s eyes in the water.

“What a son.” The man shakes his head. “My son.”

His hotel room is lavish, and he hates himself for it. He strips himself of his suit, his shoes, until there’s nothing but him and the bedsheets.

Gleb closes his eyes and finds himself revisiting electric blue.

He’s hard. It’s embarrassing. Not proper Russian behavior. But there’s her mouth, curving upward, the picture of confidence, and there’s the pinkness, the softness, her hip beneath his hand. He _wants_ her, has wanted her since the moment he saw her, but she’d run, and he’d chased, and now they’re here. Governments instead of people. Ideals instead of pleasure.

As Paris glows, he tries to forget. But he takes himself in hand, and there she is. It hurts, the ease with which he imagines her face, the softness of her mouth pressed against his. He wonders, longs after her taste: is it lemon? summer? everything Russian and not?

They could hide behind the curtain of her hair, the moon catching in its gentle light. He could tease her. Hold her. Take her by the hips and drag her to him. Duty be damned; he could lose himself in the swelling of her breasts and her kiss-swollen lips. He could love her. She could love him.

He comes to this, chest heaving, shame seething, country snarling. Gleb wipes his hands on his thighs and closes his eyes. He tries to sleep.

Paris doesn’t let him.

IX.

There is the ballet. Her coronation. The Empress’s joy. It sickens him. It galls him enough to follow her inside, to bar her escape routes and confront her, pistol in hand.

Anya – for she’ll always be Anya – stares back at him.

He tries to speak. Barely manages.

“Do you remember?”

"Yes. Ice and blood and gun shots."

“Do you want this?”

"Want what? No one wants a gun pointed at their head."

“To ruin me. To ruin Russia. To ruin _everything_.”

"...no, Gleb."

He breathes. The world smells of oranges. No, not oranges – lemons.

And Anya names herself Anastasia.

Gleb strokes the trigger, sees her lips part. Knows the heat of her, in his heart.

Can't bring himself to fire.

X.

A letter arrives, a year later, long after he’s walked away. It is unsigned, no return address. He traces the lipstick on its seal.

Inside, just a note:  _Do you ever regret chasing me?_

Gled stares out into the eternal Russian winter.

He keeps no more lemons in his desk.

**Author's Note:**

> So to tell you the truth, I really wanted to write Gleb's shame-lust and its results. In lieu of that, we got this. Thus, there will likely be another in the future which is more...PWP. Watch this space, I suppose. Let me know what you thought, as well. 
> 
> ...seriously, comment; I'm desperate and curious as to your thoughts.


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